Job Flexibility Seen as Key to Equal Pay

PHILADELPHIA—The key to narrowing the gender wage gap is restructuring jobs and making hours more flexible, a leading scholar said, suggesting that the solution to equal pay for men and women rests within the labor market itself and not on government policy.

Such changes already are afoot in some areas, including the fast-growing science, technology and health-care sectors, but less so in business, finance and law, Harvard professor Claudia Goldin said Saturday.

Ms. Goldin, president of the American Economic Association, focused on the gender wage gap during her address Saturday to the group’s annual meeting. Solutions she suggested to foster job flexibility included having teams of workers share responsibilities, diminishing the need for an individual to be at work during a particular time period.

In 2012, women earned 76.5 cents for every dollar that men did, moving no closer to narrowing a gap that has barely budged in almost a decade. Male full-time workers notched median annual earnings of $49,398, compared with $37,791 for female workers, according to a Census Bureau report late last year. In 2011, women earned 77 cents for every $1 men earned. The wage gap narrowed steadily through the 1980s and 1990s but the convergence slowed in the early 2000s.

A host of reasons have been suggested to explain the gap’s persistence, such as women choosing less-remunerative fields than men, negotiating less for raises, and taking time out from their careers to have children or care for other family members.

Ms. Goldin’s research offers far more nuanced insights than the Census data, which encompass all jobs and education levels, rather than comparing the pay of women and men in the same field, with similar levels of education.

Ms. Goldin, an economic historian and author of works including “Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women,” noted that the wage gap differs among jobs. Occupations that exert significant time pressures and require a great deal of client contact—for example, partners in law firms—have wider wage gaps than ones that don’t, such as pharmacists.

In studying business-school and law-school graduates from the same universities, Ms. Goldin found that women and men tended to have equal salaries when starting out in their careers. The wage gap was evident five years later and opened up decisively within 15 years.

Ten to 16 years after receiving their Master’s of Business Administration degrees, “women earn 55% what men [MBAs] do,” Ms. Goldin explained in the talk, based on her paper titled, “A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter.”

“Three factors explain 84% of the gap,” she wrote in the paper. “Training prior to MBA receipt, (e.g., finance courses, GPA) accounts for 24%. Career interruptions and job experience account for 30%, and differences in weekly hours are the remaining 30%. Importantly, about two-thirds of the total penalty from job interruptions is due to taking any time out.”

Family was the primary reason for women stepping away from their careers. Giving women the opportunity to keep working–on a more flexible schedule–would go a long way to narrowing the pay gap, Ms. Goldin said. Some industries already “appear to be moving in the direction of more flexibility and greater linearity of earnings with respect to time worked,” she wrote.

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